


Arbitrary Rules, Tolkien Edition

by Ferith12



Series: Arbitrary Rules [4]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:27:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,017
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24756286
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ferith12/pseuds/Ferith12
Summary: Maedhros and #8 write something without using pronouns referring to people
Series: Arbitrary Rules [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790317
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maedhros and #8 write something without using pronouns referring to people

Maedhros hung from the mountainside. The eldest son of Feanor looked down, and all the world seemed to spread out below, and all of it was ash.

Maedhros knew that that was not the case, of course. That one hanging from Morgoth’s mountainside could see only the gates of Angband and the ruin all around it, that one held by Morgoth saw only what Morgoth wished.

But that knowledge did little to ease the heart beating stubbornly within the body stapled to the cliff. Knowledge is not comfort, it is not hope, it cannot sustain. Maedhros knew that somewhere the air was clean and the desolation ended, but could not know where, or what people still lived there and had not been killed. And as time passed the picture of it faded from Medhros’s mind, and the idea of happiness seemed strange. But Maedhros refused to give up, to allow Morgoth to win, not within the privacy of Maedhros’s own mind.

Maedhros hung from the mountainside, sustained only stubbornness and spite. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Feanor and #11Write something where three (3) or more sentences are fifty (50) words or more

“What makes things beautiful?” Feanor once asked his father when he was a child. His father had smiled his sad smile and said, “I don’t know. That’s a clever question, it’s the sort of thing your mother would have asked.” And Feanor kept wondering.

Feanor always liked to take things apart and study them, to break them down and understand their parts, to learn how things worked or why they didn’t, to take all the tiny imperfections and brush them off and discard them, to make things that were flawless and beautiful and new. But beauty itself, that was so hard to pin down, so hard to make sense of. What did it mean, for something to be beautiful, what made it so, how could you define it?”

Feanor did not like things not to have definitions, perfect and exact, that marked out where a thing began and ended, how they could be made, or what formed their component parts with all the linguistic precision that Feanor demanded, because language should be logical, should be well-reasoned and able to explain all things that could exist. But beauty, that was such a vague word, so intangible, out of reach. Feanor was fascinated by beauty, by the concept and the reality. He wished to create beautiful things, yes, and to study them, but his chief interest was in beauty itself. What made a thing beautiful? Why?

“What is beauty,” Feanor asked Aule.

“Beauty simply is,” Aule said, “You cannot make up a set of rules to define it.”

But then, Aule loved the making of things more than the things made, so Feanor asked Yavanna, “What is beauty?”

And Yavana said, “Beauty is growth, it is the change of things becoming what they are, we observe this becoming, of things that should be joining the world that is, and we call it beautiful.” “That is a good enough explanation for the beauty of your own creations,” Feanor said, “But what of other things, what of the beauty of gems, or the majesty of mountains?”

“The beauty of gems is in the light that touches them,” Yavanna said, “It is in the way the gems change that light and magnify it, sparkling in its innumerable colors. The beauty of a mountain is the beauty of a thing unchanged, for a little while, in the context of the world changing around it.”

“You argue very well,” Feanor said, but still he was unconvinced.

So he went and asked Varda, who made the innumerable stars, “What is beauty.”

“Beauty,” Varda said, “Is a spark that Eru has put in us. To make a beautiful thing is to complete a piece of the work that He has begun in you, to recognize something beautiful is to recognize the hand of Eru. Beauty is the music, resonating in perfect harmony, for just a fraction of a moment.”

“Then,” Feanor said, “There is no beauty outside of the arbitrary decree of Eru? There is no reason for it that can be described in and of itself?”

“There is nothing outside of Eru,” Varda said, “Is not He reason enough?”

Feanor did not like this answer, and he ceased seeking answers from the Valar.

Feanor made a special study of beauty; it fascinated him him in its inexplicability and its universality, the way that such diverse things as a word or a tune or a painting or the vast ocean or the changing of the lights could all be said to have the same quality, one that could not be singled out to be studied on its own. Order, he thought, might have something to do with it. Beautiful things tended to have a balance, a pattern that they held, certain sequences of numbers that reappeared in music and in nature. But that, he knew, could not be all. He thought perhaps something in the nature of the trees had the secret, that light might hold beauty in its purest form, and he wished to study it, tease apart its secrets and create something beautiful, the most beautiful, that was all his own.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Beren and #4, Describe something without using sight (from the POV of a sighted person)

Trees were comforting things, Beren thought, comforting in their cruelty and in their kindness both. The hardness of a trunk beneath his back as he slept, the twisted roots coiling like snakes beneath his legs. He loved the smell of the trees. He learned to know them by smell, there in the deep entanglement of Melian’s girdle. 

He climbed them, reached up and up and up, the rough bark beneath his fingers, tearing lightly at his skin, until he could feel the warmth of the sun over-head, between the soft, cool leaves.

Trees were things which held hope within their boughs, even as they trapped you beneath them, birds singing and bringing news, if you were very lucky perhaps a fruit. They were guardians, captors, friends in the vast loneliness.

Trees were neither good nor evil. You were nothing to a tree, they could not eat you, and you could not gnaw through their trunks. That was its own sort of comfort.


End file.
